In Joseph Farah's world, being (justly) ignored means you make the same argument again, only more shrill.

Farah already devoted an Oct. 6 column to complaining that the rest of the world is ignoring Reza Kahlili's WND-published claim that President Obama purportedly cut a deal with Iran to stop its uranium enrichment as a pre-election "October surprise." But everyone ignored that too, so Farah is trying again in his Oct. 11 column:

Last week, WND reported the breathtaking story, based on impeccable Iranian sources, that Barack Obama sent an emissary to Qatar to meet with a representative of the ayatollah to offer a secret deal – one that would help Obama win his re-election bid.

It was a shocker – even by Obama standards.

The White House was offering Iran a deal to reduce international sanctions against the rogue, terrorist-supporting nation developing nuclear weapons if it simply agreed to suspend uranium enrichment for two weeks before the U.S. election – allowing Obama to announce a phony “diplomatic coup.”

As the story pointed out, this could well be the “October Surprise” Obama planned to overcome his fading support among the American public.It was quite a story, indeed. But it was not picked up by a single news agency in the country – therefore leaving open the possibility Obama can still pull it off.

[...]

To say the least, this kind of reporting is expensive and risky. How did the rest of the media respond? With another collective yawn.

In other words, the word is not getting out. Despite the precision and grainy detail offered by WND’s reports, the rest of the media simply ignored these startling revelations, as if they never happened.

As we pointed out last time, Kahlili's sources are anonumous, so there's no way anyone can judge how "impeccable" they are. Further, Kahlili's fearmongering claims -- he's best known for his discredited claim that Iran was planning nuclear suicide bombings with "a thousand suitcase bombs spread around Europe and the U.S." -- are treated with skepticism by actual Middle East analysts.

In other words, Kahlili can't be trusted. But that inconvenient fact isn't stopping Farah from going into full conspiracy mode:

Could it be that important national security stories are taking a backseat to the fluff and celebrity gossip spewed out by the media on an hourly basis?

Could it be we don’t have a free press in America any longer – only a state-sponsored, controlled media?

Could it be that even the so-called alternative press in America – which doesn’t do this kind of investigative reporting itself – is guarding its own franchises and businesses by failing to acknowledge the one independent, alternative news agency, the original, I might add, that is kicking butt and taking no prisoners in its efforts to seek out and sort out the truth?

Of course, Farah ignores the elephant in the room: WND has so beclowned and discredited itself with its near-pathologiclal obsession with smearing President Obama with all manner of sleaze and untruths that nobody believes what's published there.

Led by Jerome Corsi, WND is so invested in the idea that Obama's birth certificate is fake -- even instigating Sheriff Joe Arpaio's cold case posse "investigation" of the issue and sucking up to Arpaio so hard that Corsi was a de facto member of the posse -- that it has refused to acknowledge all evidence (and there's a lot) that contradicts Corsi's conspiracy theory.

Just in the past week, Corsi's big "scoop" that blurry, blown-up photos prove a ring Obama wears contains the statement "There is no god except Allah" in Arabic was shot down by one of his own birther buddies, Mara Zebest. And yes, Farah wrote a column wondering why the media was ignoring this too.

It's simple -- nobody believes WND. Even birthers have stopped believing it. Farah has nobody but himself to blame for that.

The flip side to Ronald Kessler's Romney-fluffing is attacks on Mitt Romney's enemies, chief among them President Obama and Vice Presdient Joe Biden.

Kessler devotes his Oct. 15 Newsmax column to the latter, declaring that "Biden’s arrogance during the debate also provides a window on his character."Kessler then rehashes an attack on Biden he first peddled in June:

Since becoming vice president, Biden has come down with a malady known by insiders as White House-itis. As described in my book, “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,” it befalls presidents, vice presidents, and White House aides who are not well grounded to begin with and let the intoxicating power of the White House go to their head.

As noted in my story, "Biden Spends $1 Million Annually for Weekend Trips," every Friday the vice president takes a helicopter designated as Marine Two from the vice president’s residence in northwest Washington to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. He then hops on Air Force Two to fly back to his home in Delaware. At the end of the weekend, he returns on Air Force Two, usually a Boeing C-32.

On Saturdays in warm weather, Biden regularly returns to Andrews on the airplane to play golf at the base with President Obama. After the game, he flies back to Delaware. On Sunday evening, he returns on the plane to Washington — all at taxpayer expense.

The Boeing C-32 is a specially configured Boeing 757-200 commercial jet. The cost of flying the plane is $22,000 an hour, so each half-hour trip to or from Delaware costs about $10,000. Each golf game costs taxpayers $20,000. At that rate, the annual cost to taxpayers of Biden’s weekend trips is well over $1 million. That does not include so-called deadhead flights when the plane often flies back to Washington empty and then returns empty to pick up Biden.

In addition, the Secret Service rents more than 20 condominiums in the Wilmington area for agents who must accompany Biden when he returns to his home state. Rather than try to find hotel space, the Secret Service decided to rent the condos in part because, even when he knows his schedule in advance, Biden rarely tells agents until the last minute when he will be returning to Wilmington beyond his weekend trips. As a result, agents cannot plan their own lives.

A Secret Service agent says that since Air Force Two parks at Andrews, Obama is obviously aware that Biden is running up a huge government tab for each game of golf they play.

But Kessler, both here and in his original June article, fails to back up his claims, and he relies on an unverifiable anonymous Secret Service agent to make his attacks.

Kessler has more than proven himself to be a pro-Romney hack. Why trust his attacks on Obama and Biden?

Last month, Chuck Norris released a video in which the clear implication was that if President Obama was re-elected, it could result in "one thousand years of darkness."

Apparently, Norris didn't take kindly to how crazy that sounded, so he re-edited the video. And WorldNetDaily is only too happy to properly spin things from what the "establishment media" said about it.

In an Oct. 9 article, WND wants it known that Norris was merely quoting Ronald Reagan, not specifically saying crazy things about Obama's re-election:

A public-service announcement by martial arts, television and movie star Chuck Norris and his wife, Gena, that encouraged people of faith to vote in this election included a quotation from President Ronald Reagan in which he said failing to preserve the United States would be to sentence children “to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

So this is what the establishment media wrote:

“Vote for Romney or Suffer ‘a Thousand Years of Darkness,’ Says Chuck Norris” from Adweek

“Chuck Norris: If Obama Is Reelected, It Could Bring About ‘One Thousand Years Of Darkness” from Mediaite

“Chuck Norris Warns of ‘Thousand Years of Darkness’ if Obama Reelected” from Hollywood Gossip

and “Chuck Norris: America faces ’1,000 years of darkness’ if Obama wins reelection” from NBC

The video has gone viral, being viewed by millions. There’s no doubt of its influence, even though it does not endorse a presidential candidate, because of the impact of previous statements from Norris that were endorsements.

[...]

But to counter the spin created by the legacy media reports, those who made the original public service announcement now have released a new edition, this time including a video clip of Ronald Reagan, to make doubly sure people understand who was making that statement.

We didn't know that Mediaite and AdWeek were the "establishment media."

The implication that Obama will destroy the country if re-elected, and would be better off under Mitt Romney, remains. He still implies that Obama is "evil" by repeating the famous Edmund Burke quote about good men doing nothing. And the implication that Obama will plunge the country into "a thousand years of darkness" remains obvious despite the words coming out of Reagan's mouth instead of Norris'.

In an Oct. 12 CNSNews.com article, Patrick Goodenough offered up a strange, biased fact-check of the vice presidential debate.

Biased because, well, it's CNS. Seven statements from Joe Biden were cited, versus two from Paul Ryan. Strange because it focused on foreign policy questions (CNS published no other fact-check on the rest of the debate) and because of Goodenough's approach to fact-checking.

Responding to a pair of Biden statements highlighting how Iran is "more isolated today than when we took office" and that "the world for the first time totally united in opposition" to Iran getting a nuclear weapon, Goodenough responded by ... referencing a meeting a non-aligned organizations that was recently held in Iran.

How does that disprove Biden's claim that Iran is isolated in the international community? Goodenough doesn't explain. No other fact-checker we could find addressed the claim, which means it must be true.

Meanwhile, Goodenough served as an apologist for Ryan on his statement that "It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that" the attack on the U.S. consulate "was a terrorist attack":

On September 18, one week after the attack, Obama used the words “extremists and terrorists” to describe those who attacked the consulate and other U.S. missions. It would have been easy to miss, however: The president did not use the phrase in an Oval Office statement or at a White House press conference, but on CBS’ “The Late Show.”

Obama has met with Netanyahu nine times since taking office. The Israeli leader reportedly requested a tenth meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York last month, but no meeting was scheduled. Instead Obama made his fifth appearance on the daytime television show, “The View.”

It's a strange, nitpicky and lazy fact-check -- just the kind of thing you'd expect CNS to churn out.

Matt Barber uses his Oct. 12 WorldNetDaily column to repeat an outright lie about President Obama:

Moreover, during the 2008 campaign, Obama lamented that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

Let that sink in a moment. In his own words, this man – a man solemnly sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution – has betrayed utter disdain for it. He has, in essence, admitted that he views our most sacred founding document as a “constraint” against his thinly veiled efforts to “fundamentally transform” America into Greece.

As we documented four years ago, Obama was not "lamenting" that the Warren Court didn't "break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" -- he was making the accurate observation that because it didn't, the Warren Court wasn't as "radical" as people think it is.

Barber dishonestly took Obama's quote out of context and lied about what Obama said. On top of that, Barber falsely claims that Obama said this in 2008; in fact, it comes from a 2001 interview that surfaced in the 2008 campaign.

Barber works for right-wing legal group Liberty Counsel. Surely he knows what happens when you deliberately tell a lie -- some people call that perjury. Does Barber have the moral character to correct his lie and apologize for telling it? Doubtful.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people with full-time jobs increased by 838,000 in September to 115.2 million, while the number of people with part-time jobs declined by 26,000 to 27.7 million.

In other words: All of the gains in employment were due to full-time jobs.

It’s right there in Table A-9.

How did all of those people get it wrong? By looking at separate table ( Table A-8 ) that shows a big spike in the number of people who want a full-time job but who are forced to settle for less than 35 hours of work because of the tepid economy or weak demand at their company.

The BLS explains that the number of people involuntarily working part-time rose, even though the total number of part-timers declined. It’s the total number of part-timers that helps determine the unemployment rate.

The MRC is not exactly known for correcting items unless they're so obviously wrong that it can't be avoided. You'd think this would fall under that category, but it's more likely that Gainor and Seymour will just shove this under the rug and stay silent about their error.

Ellis Washington regularly beclowns himself in his WorldNetDaily -- see, for instance, his insistence on turning Socrates into a right-wing nutjob like he is. Washington achieves a new level of ... something in his Oct. 12 column by drawing wildly wrong, and unintentionally hilarious, parallels between President Obama and, yes, Caligula by treating every lunatic Obama conspiracy theory -- up to and including Obama killing his gay lovers -- as proven fact:

And now comes, I, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus-Caligula (A.D. 12-A.D. 41). I was the third son of Germanicus (nephew of Tiberius), and Agrippina the elder and was born at Antium in A.D. 12.

And now comes, I, Barack Hussein Obama (1961-). I was the illegitimate first son of Stanley Anne Durham and my real father, the Soviet agent and communist propagandist, Frank Marshall Davis. We were born four weeks apart (Aug. 4/Aug. 31).

[...]

I, Caligula, know that there were rumors surrounding the death of Tiberius. It is very likely that the 77-year-old emperor did not simply die of old age. On my authority, Naevius Cordus Sertorius Macro, commander of the Praetorians, rushed inside and smothered Tiberius with a cushion, suffocating him.

I, Obama, had several gay lovers that I had to dispense with including – Donald Young, the openly-gay choir director of the church in Chicago of which I, Obama, was a member for some 20 years – Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ black liberation theology. There were two other openly gay men in Wright’s church: Larry Bland and Nate Spencer. We were all members of Wright’s “Down Low Club.” In late 2007, as I, Obama, began my ascent to be the Democratic Socialist Party’s presidential nominee, in a span of one-and-a-half months, all three men conveniently died.

[...]

I, Obama, like my predecessors, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, am indeed a narcissist neophyte, like the ambitious, arrogant Phaeton of Greek mythology, who assumed he could drive Helios’ (his sun god father’s) chariot to prove he was divine, but all his tragic leadership accomplished was to scorch the planet and render large parts of the earth a perpetual desert wasteland. To stop Phaeton and his genocidal madness, Zeus was forced to kill him.

In the 11-minute video of the interview attached to the article, Kessler tosses softball after softball to Romney, heavy on "somebody did this, what's your reaction" type of questions that prompts Romney to spout his usual talking points. These are hardly the kind of challenging questions one expects from someone who purports to be a journalist, though is exactly the kind of question one expects of a Romney sycophant.

Sample question from Kessler:

Ann Romney mentioned to me that when you are at Bain Capital,, you almost never brought work home because you were devoted to your family, you wanted to spend time with your kids. Looking back, I wish I had been that way as a father. That's pretty remarkable, and I wonder how that translates into a desire to strengthen families, what you would do in that regard.

It's unclear when the interview was conducted (it appears to have been on Oct. 12 because Romney referenced the vice presidential debate "last night"), but at one point Kessler said to Romney that "wholesale gasoline prices went up again today." But gas prices have been trending down for the past month.

WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi has managed to write something that even birthers are skeptical about.

We've noted the craziness of Corsi's claim that blurry, blown-up photos prove that a ring Obama has worn reads "There is no god except Allah." Turns out we're not the only ones.

The Birther Report blog (aka Obama Release Your Records) cited a "prominent computer software and graphics expert" who says that the claim by Corsi, via Obama-hating filmmaker Joel Gilbert, is a "major hoax," that Gilbert's images were Photoshopped, and that a high-resolution image of Obama's ring shows that it has no Arabic symbols on it.

That prompted Corsi to pen a follow-up article responding to the Birther Report's then-unnamed expert having Gilbert insisting that he "made no alteration whatsoever" to the pattern on the ring. Corsi made no mention of the high-resolution image.

In response to that, the Birther Report named its "expert" -- turns out it's none other than Mara Zebest, a birther who made a supporting appearance alongside Corsi last year at WND's press conference announcing its defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine (recently booted out of court). In a June 2011 article, Corsi touted Zebest as "a nationally recognized computer expert who has served as contributing author and technical editor for more than 100 books on Adobe and Microsoft software."

Corsi has not addressed the issue at WND since the Birther Report's "expert" was revealed to be Zebest.

This isn't the only instance of right-wingers backing away from Corsi's ring claim:

A Free Republic thread on Corsi's article is filled with detractors, one of whom wrote, "there is a reason why WND is known (even here) as 'World Nut Daily.'"

Richard Bartholomew notes that anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller, who initially blogged in support of Corsi's article, apparently deleted that post without explanation.

Would you consider this to be a rather explosive story weeks before the presidential election?

I would, too.

But the abject lack of curiosity by the media – both establishment and alternative – is, shall we say, somewhat stunning.

That’s not to say the public isn’t fascinated. In fact, the story is off the charts in terms of readership. More people read the story and viewed the images and analysis in the first few hours of its release than watch CNN in the same time period.

Yet it is another of those stories about which we cannot speak – at least insofar as the self-appointed information cops have determined.

[...]

I don’t know about you, but I think this is an important story – maybe one of the biggest of the presidential election year. That it had to wait so long to be told reflects the inherent mystery still surrounding the man in the White House and a hapless press just too afraid to go certain places in the pursuit of the truth.

Farah appears not to have considered the possibility that nobody else is reporting the story becuase it isn't true.

When can we expect a correction and apology from Corsi and Farah about this? Our impression of that answer is here.

Richard Bartholomew -- a friend of ConWebWatch who writes the excellent Bartholomew's Notes on Religion blog -- had a run-in with British anti-Muslim activist Charlie Flowers, and it temporarilly shut down his blog.

Bartholomew had written a blog about Flowers in which he quoted comments Flowers made on his Facebook page. In retaliation, Flowers contacted Bartholomew's U.S.-based hosting company and filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The host shut down Bartholomew's site, restoring it only after Bartholomew deleted the offending Flowers post. Bartholomew declined to file a counterclaim because it would make his home address available to Flowers, who has clearly demonstrated himself to be vindictive.

Bartholomew correctly points out, "The notion that someone should be able forbid any quotation of their words is manifestly absurd, and if applied generally would make any kind of journalism impossible."

MRC Intern Learns To Shout 'Media Bias!' When A Reporter Asks A Republican A Question He Doesn't LikeTopic: NewsBusters

Matt Vespa is an intern at the Media Research Center, and he seems to be learning the MRC's tactics well, all the way down to declaring that any questioning of Republican politicians that isn't completely friendly is obviously "liberal bias."

In an Oct. 10 NewsBusters post, Vespa goes on a tirade against CNN's Soledad O'Brien over her interview of Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz over alleged security lapses:

With a House Oversight committee slated to hold a hearing on the deadly Benghazi consulate terrorist attack at noon today, there was really no excuse for CNN's Starting Point to not cover the story. But alas, anchor Soledad O'Brien checked her journalistic credibility at the dressing room door, going on air with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sounding more like an Obama apologist than a hard-nosed reporter.

O'Brien questioned Rep. Chaffetz -- who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations -- on his claim that this administration hasn’t been forthcoming with the facts surrounding the attack. O’Brien countered by admonishing the congressman for suggesting “collusion” between the Obama White House and the State Department. O’Brien’s hackery became overt when she indirectly blamed Congressman Chaffetz for being complicit to the lack of security at our embassies by voting to cut off their defense funding, attempting to dilute any blame the administration has for lax security by trying to lay blame on Republicans in Congress:

Why shouldn't O'Brien have asked Chaffetz about his vote on State Department security funding? Vespa never really explains. Indeed, he goes on to insist that "the story centers on the state of our security concerning our embassy in Libya. It’s not whether Rep. Chaffetz’s vote to cut off embassy security funding had a hand in the death of Ambassador Stevens."

It seems that, in addition to sounding like he works for Mitt Romney's campaign, Vespa simply did not want the question asked at all. It's another example of how the MRC doesn't want anyone to tell the truth about Republicans and conservatives.

After my WND column a couple of weeks back using probability theory to demonstrate that Black Jesus’ “birth certificate” is as bogus as Piltdown Man, the Huffington Pest huffingtoned and puffingtoned about it.

The Pest’s founder, Arianna Stassinopoulos, was with me at Cambridge. She drove around in a racing-green Lamborghini till she neglected the lubrication and the engine seized. Daddy didn’t buy her another one. Hubby got her a website instead.

The fragrant Ms. Katastrophikos’ canting leftoblog was not the only one to whinge about my column. The Sinistrosphere went bananas. Looks like we got them good and worried. Not one of the rants made any serious attempt to challenge my argument. By now they all know the White House website is an embarrassing crime scene.

They also know they can absolutely rely upon the Republicans in Congress not to lift a finger to uphold the Constitution they swore to uphold. The evidence that BJ’s “birth certificate” is a lie is beyond reasonable doubt. Just ask the sheriff who spent nine months investigating it.

One of the most telling moments took place a day or so before the debate, when Obama showed up at a public event, telling his groupies that essentially he was playing hooky because his handlers were “trying to make me do my homework.” That was the quintessential Obama, the laziest kid in the 11th grade, whining that grown-ups were demanding he do boring stuff like hitting the books and studying when all he really wanted to do was play video games.

From Day 1, when he had Pelosi and Reid draw up the details of his trillion-dollar stimulus bill and assigned the federal bureaucrats to churn out the 2,700-page tome we now know as Obamacare, he has shown that the only things he really likes about being president is that it allows him to play a lot of golf and to address fawning crowds of union members, college students, welfare recipients and multi-million-dollar donors.

Destroying the enemy’s myth of invincibility is the gift that keeps on giving. After Stalingrad, every Nazi down to the rank of corporal was watching his rear, trying to pin blame on others, living the invidious lie that post-Stalingrad Germany could somehow still win, and blaming Hitler – which was valid – without being seen as blaming Hitler – which was fatal. A lot of doors were slammed by Nazi officers into the faces of other Nazi officers. Profanity ended what had been brotherly conversations since kindergarten. Once the myth of Nazi invincibility was broken, goose-stepping occupiers became unhappy campers.

It was my personal pleasure plus journalistic good fortune to befriend a German soldier who was in a “Hollywood” kind of confrontation toward the war’s end as the unstoppable Americans closed in. Another German of equal rank in that German village called out for “jihad,” suicidal resistance to the last man, woman and child. My friend, Klaus, called him an idiot and took his weapon away and surrendered to the first approaching Americans. Klaus told me it wasn’t hard to take his weapon away!

It seemed to me Obama was on something – or maybe off something he is usually on.

Which raises a very old, lingering question: Why has Obama refused to release – among many other things like a non-fraudulent birth certificate, student transcripts, college and university records, law school writings, passport and travel records, a legit Social Security number, etc., etc., etc. – his health records?

What is he hiding there?

What deep, dark secrets could one of America’s youngest and most physically active occupants of the White House in history be so concerned about?

We know about his admissions to being a major cocaine user back in his wild days. He told us all about that – or his ghostwriter did – in “Dreams From My Father.”

[...]

But what if his drug use continued?

That would be one obvious reason for withholding medical records.

Or maybe Obama is on some prescription drugs for a condition we don’t know about.

That would be another obvious reason for withholding medical records.

But, if you are a healthy young presidential pretender, what other justifications would there be for hiding medical records from the public?

In cyberspace, Obama supporters – almost certainly egged on by the president’s legions of bloggers and social-media plants – have threatened to riot should Mitt Romney win the presidency next month. They’ve also contended that blacks will once again be relegated to slavery should Romney win (something black liberals also said about Ronald Reagan, by the way). It bears mentioning that much of this has been expressed in urban black patois.

When BHO comes at Romney next Tuesday with accusations of lying, talking about his hiding money in the Caymans, exporting jobs overseas while at Bain Capital, not paying his income taxes – even eating little kids for breakfast – Romney had better be prepared to respond with at least B-grade ammo. What he was throwing at President Pansy in the first debate was mere C-grade ammunition, and it was more than enough to make Obama glad he wore Pampers to the event.

It’s obvious that the Dirty Dems are going to prop up His Royal Laziness and try to resurrect his image as the omniscient, omnipotent visitor from Krypton. Thus, Romney’s timid team must convince him that to survive the coming Obama attacks, he will need to use the equivalent of Molotov cocktails – not firecrackers – to defend himself.

In my column “Why do Republicans so fear the truth?” I listed a number of truths that I would like to see Romney and his ad people convey to the public – Obama’s years of mentoring by Frank Marshall Davis, his sealed college papers, starting his political career in the home of Bill Ayers and his current endorsement from the Communist Party USA, to name but a few.

However, even I recognize that it would be difficult to use such A-grade ammunition in a debate, especially now that Romney’s use of C-grade ammo was more than enough to easily make Obama look like a confused and incompetent kid in their first encounter.

Winning the White House takes a “killer instinct,” particularly given Obama’s and Biden’s ruthless socialist and ultra-leftist philosophy – first perfected by the Bolsheviks at Red Square – that the ends justify the means. Even with the electoral map looking somewhat better for Romney and Ryan after Obama’s collapse in the first presidential debate, Obama and his partner in crime, Biden, are only down but hardly out. Like the ruthless Bolshevik thugs they are, expect some major gambits and outrageous acts in the days ahead to destroy Romney and Ryan so they and their leftist minions can retain control of our so-called government – to dominate our lives, remove our freedoms and redistribute wealth to them and their friends, communist style.

CNS editor in chief has always been a gay-hater -- so much so that he'll distort his work in order to up the gay-hate factor.

Jeffrey does this again with an Oct. 10 article carrying the overly long headline "U.S. Embassy in Libya Sought $13,000-Per-Year Bodyguards With ‘Limited’ English; But Gave Preference to Citizen ‘Same-Sex Domestic Partners’ of U.S. Gov’t Employees."

But Jeffrey's headline is dishonest. As Jeffrey notes in the article, the hiring preference is for "qualified U.S. citizens who were family members of U.S. government employees." Same-sex partners are included in that.

Jeffrey has needlessly and recklessly tainted the journalistic reputation of his "news" organization bymaking dishonest gay-bashing a priority over reporting facts. He hates gays more than he loves the truth.

Jeffrey also seems to love clicks more than the truth as well -- his dishonest story was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, which surely generated an elevated level of traffic to CNS.

How does Jeffrey get away with this? It seems that he is aspiring to the jerkass levels of his Media Research Center boss, Brent Bozell, and MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham.

NewsBusters haslongbeen a source of global warming bamboozlement. Why would he stop now?

And stop he doesn't in an Oct. 10 NewsBusters post mocking an Associated Press article carrying the headline Experts: Global Warming Means More Antarctic Ice." Sheppard huffed that climate scientists (of which Sheppard is not) "this truly amazing concept that anthropogenic global warming can melt ice in one hemisphere while creating it in another," going on to sneer that this was "unbelievable."

If it's amazing, that's because it's supported by science -- something neither Sheppard nor the deniers he calls upon to back him up, Christopher Horner and Steve Goddard, want to admit.

As Media Matters points out, the AP article accurately explained that Antarctic sea ice growth is consistent with climate scientists' projections for a warming planet, even as Arctic ice decreases.

Media Matters also reminds us that Sheppard's fellow bamboozlers are suspect -- Horner works at the Competitive Enterprise Institute is funded in part by the oil and tobacco industries, and Goddard is a birther as well as a global warming denier.

As befits its current Romney-shilling mode, Newsmax was eager to portray Paul Ryan as the winner of his debate with Joe Biden. Shortly after the debate, Newsmax went with this rah-rah story by Martin Gould, under the headline ﻿"Grinning Biden Fails to Throw Ryan Off Course":

A grinning Joe Biden became the overwhelming image of Thursday’s vice presidential debate as he made a conscious effort to undermine virtually every point his rival Paul Ryan made.

“Malarky,” “bunch of stuff,” “loose talk,” “not true,” “let me translate that” “not mathematically possible,” “this is amazing,” he said of various points Ryan made during the 90-minute debate.

But Ryan refused to be bowed by the older man’s attempts to talk down to him and belittle his points, hitting Biden with a torrent of detailed figures.

Newsmax promoted this article with a large top-of-the-front-page graphic:

Strangely, though, this article no longer exists on the Newsmax website. The link where the article originally resided now contains what appears to be a heavily rewritten version of the story credited to "Newsmax Wires," which claims that Biden's "grinning, laughing and disrespectful performance was panned by commentators and pollsters." The article's original lead now appears several paragraphs down.

The original article was reposted at TeaParty.org, if you want to see the first rah-rah draft.

Why did Newsmax go through all the effort to rewrite the article and not simply post a different one? It's not like Gould's original is more embarrassing than, say, Ronald Kessler's creepy fawning over Ann Romney. Seems like a lot of work for not very much payoff.